Narration from Beyond: Mary Alice and the Justified Viewer
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18 GRAAT On-Line issue #6 December 2009 Narration from beyond: Mary Alice and the justified viewer Catherine Hoffmann Université du Havre Whether we flaunt our addiction to television series or conceal it from our peers and betters, serial watching is likely to cause some feeling of guilt in an academic‘s conscience. As for devoting valuable research time to such objects, it still seems to require some justification if not apology, as the following observations, gleaned from serious academic work on the subject, indicate. Jennifer Hayward, in Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, before developing her own approach to serial fiction, finds it necessary to remind her reader of the traditional attitude of intellectuals: ―soap operas have been derided as a mindless and archetypal ‗female‘ narrative form‖.1 She goes on to suggest that ―One way to escape the need, so central to the habitus of academics, to evaluate and then canonize particular texts is to focus on function rather than ‗quality‘.‖2 In his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ―Film and television narrative‖, Jason Mittell is more explicitly apologetic in his vindication of television series: It might appear that popular film and television, as mainstream mass media, require little effort to comprehend the stories they tell; after all, they are typically designed for millions of viewers as an entertaining diversion.3 19 Yet, he concludes, at their most complex, television narratives […] counter the stereotype of the television audience as passive couch potatoes. Instead, such narratives help create highly engaged, participatory viewers. Of course, the critical prejudices against which Hayward or Mittell react are nothing new: Dickens‘s serial novels came under heavy fire from highbrow critics who saw their popular appeal and mass consumption as proof of their low aesthetic value. My contribution is not intended as another refutation of strictures against serial viewing, but merely seeks to reflect, from the perspective of narrative theory, on the subjective pleasures experienced while watching the first four seasons of Desperate Housewives as a rank-and-file consumer of series. Of these pleasures, the most enduring I have found to be provided by the voice-over narration as heard on the original version. The first voice we hear in the pilot episode is that of the female narrator, Mary Alice Young, played by actress Brenda Strong: My name is Mary Alice Young. When you read this morning‘s paper,4 you may come across an article about the unusual day I had last week. Normally, there is never anything noteworthy about my life, but that all changed last Thursday. Of course everything seemed quite normal at first. I made breakfast for my family. I performed my chores. I completed my projects. I ran my errands. In truth, I spent the day as I spent every other day, quietly polishing the routine of my life until it gleamed with perfection. That‘s why it was so astonishing when I 20 decided to go to my hallway closet and retrieve a revolver that had never been used. My body was discovered by my neighbour, Mrs Martha Huber, who had been startled by a strange popping sound. I shall return later to the effects of the metaleptic address to the audience, which playfully abolishes the boundary between the diegetic world to which the character of Mary Alice belongs and the real world of the viewers/listeners.5 At this stage, I only wish to stress that this device, combined with the conceit of narration from beyond the grave, acts as an emphatic marker of fictionality, similar in its function to the ―Once upon a time‖ of fairy tales. We therefore willingly suspend our disbelief to follow Mary Alice through the looking glass into the fictional world. With one notable exception in Season Three Episode Sixteen when, also from beyond the grave, Rex Van de Kamp takes over,6 her voice will frame each episode and shape our viewing throughout, even though, after the first instalments, Mary Alice‘s vocal presence is mostly confined to the recaps, teasers, and endings. Voice- over narration in Desperate Housewives performs obvious unifying and structural functions, and Rex‘s brief temping as narrator follows the same principles while confirming that, on Desperate Housewives, death is a prerequisite for characters to qualify as narrators,7 a situation which may drive classical narratologists to terminological confusion if not desperation. The best of both worlds Before her death, Mary Alice was a character—the most desperate of all— inhabiting the diegetic world to which her friends still belong. When she uses the pronoun ‗I‘, it can refer either to herself as character, or as narrator. She therefore fulfils the basic conditions for being regarded as a character-narrator, or homodiegetic narrator. Besides, her suicide makes her central to the main plot line of the first season, since her fatal pulling of the trigger is precisely what triggers the dynamics of investigation and gradual revelations about her past. 21 Yet, death endows the narrating ‗I‘ with powers normally granted only to omniscient narrative agencies. Mary Alice thus enjoys the best of both worlds: as a former participant in the story world, she can relate her past emotional engagement with the other characters, her first-hand experience of life on Wisteria Lane, in a way that a non-character narrator could not. As an omniscient narrator, she is ubiquitous, neither here nor there but everywhere at all times, and plays havoc with deictics. In this respect, her literally disembodied voice epitomizes the characteristics of voice- over, which, in the words of Sarah Kozloff, ―comes from another time and space, the time and space of the discourse.‖8 Mary Alice‘s omniscience manifests itself in various ways, most of them familiar to novel readers. In particular, she has direct access to the characters‘ thoughts, motives, secret plans and actions. She knows everything about their past, including details unlikely to have been disclosed to her when alive, and this she puts to full use in her humorous summaries of characters‘ lives. Naturally, she does not share all her knowledge with the audience, especially where her own secrets are concerned, but then, this is manipulation of the most conventional kind, practised by homodiegetic as well as heterodiegetic narrators in fiction, who hold back essential information, the better to excite the audience‘s curiosity.9 In serial fiction, whether of the printed or visual kind, this device is vital to the continuing existence of the work or the show. Mary Alice also knows about the future, about which she discloses just enough to make us wriggle in anticipation of the next instalments or season, a proleptic power she shares with other omniscient narrators. Her use of the past tense to narrate the characters‘ present dramatized on screen should be understood as a marker of fictionality, not of temporality, as Käte Hamburger convincingly demonstrated in her analysis of the ―epic preterite‖.10 Besides, the grammar signals the ontological disjunction between the narrator—whose existence is purely verbal— and the diegetic world where characters anthropomorphically experience the irreversible passing of time together with their own spatial limitations. In many ways, Mary Alice‘s story-telling relies on techniques routinely used in written narratives. Her status as dead character-narrator is not medium specific either. However, it could be said of voice-over narration in general that it, too, enjoys 22 the best of both worlds: the discursive and the visual. As Sarah Kozloff observes, ―‗narrated‘ films are hybrids‖ combining oral story-telling, one of the oldest modes of narration, and ―cinematic story-telling, one of the youngest, most technologically dependent‖.11 Whereas in the case of written narratives, the term ‗voice‘ is used metaphorically, in voice-over narration, as in traditional oral story-telling, the narrator‘s voice has a genuine existence and presence as sound. In the debates on the vexed question of who really narrates in fiction films, one of the views often stated, among others by Sarah Kozloff, André Gaudrault and François Jost,12 is that, even in voice-over narration, the story is, in fact, communicated by an image-maker. I have neither the wish nor the competence to join the theoretical fray on this subject. Obviously, the story world and events in Desperate Housewives are communicated to the audience through a complex combination of spoken words, moving pictures and music, the finished product being the result of various operations and of collective work. However if we leave aside the actual making of and remain at the level of the series as narrative fiction, we are explicitly invited to accept the conceit that the images on screen are conjured up by Mary Alice‘s own unrestricted sight, so that there is no discrepancy between what is shown to the audience and what she is able to see from beyond the grave, a principle she states in the teaser of Season One Episode Two: ―Of course, what is visible to the dead could also be seen by the living if they‘d only take the time to look.‖ This is precisely what we viewers do, week after week, episode after episode, but the framing conceit and the permanence of the narrator‘s voice imply that our activity as audience is mediated and shaped by our actual listening to Mary Alice‘s story telling and our let’s pretend game of watching with her. In his work on the voice in cinema, Michel Chion reminds us that, [s]ince the very dawn of time, voices have presented images […]. The very first image presenter is the mother […].